February 2012
3 posts
Molecular Psychiatry - Meta-analysis of... →
Even samples sizes in the tens of thousands only uncover a handful of genome wide associations for personality. The effect sizes of genes influencing personality are either small or not tagged by the current crop of SNPs. High nonadditive genetic variance may mean that models incorporating epistasis are required to find the underlying genetic variance.
via @StuartJRitchie
January 2012
5 posts
ERVs are sexed-up bivariate heritabilities
Complex diseases such as major depression show considerable heritability but linkage and genome-wide association studies have so far not identified a sufficient number of genetic variants to account for the observed genetic variance. One problem might be that the observed phenotype of interest, such as incidence of major depression, is too far removed from the underlying genetic variants to...
“…it’s very tempting to believe things when they imply many self-serving...”
– Eric Falkenstein, Do Academics Overfit?
“I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within...”
– Richard Hamming, You and Your Research via @dantekgeek via @PsychScientists
December 2011
5 posts
Whatever you do, somebody in psychometrics already... →
Andrew Gelman notes a long-standing principle in statistics.
Heart of Darwin
It is hard summarizing the heart of a great idea or the intellectual history of a paradigm being integrated in a few words or even a paragraph. I think I have a hard time doing it, so I am interested in instances that don’t quite seem to capture it.1
Going over various thinking on the evolution of psychological diversity, I came across Tooby & Cosmides2 contending that
At the heart...
Phylogenetic inertia in primate sociality
Social structure seems to evolve more slowly than morphological adaptations. Shultz and co. tested alternative models of the evolution of social structure in primates and challenge the notion that social structure adapts fluidly to ecological conditions (the ‘socioecological hypothesis’). This fits with the observation that social and behavioral evolution in macaques is also highly...
1 tag
Total Impact →
Interesting new search-citation engine that tracks down how many people are reading, citing, bookmarking, and blogging about articles, data, presentations, genes, and code. This generalized the citation of traditional articles and makes them only on instance of a research object.
I searched for a few of my papers and Total Impact turned up Mendeley listings and a blog post by Elizabeth Preston...
November 2011
1 post
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be...”
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (via psychotherapy)
September 2011
1 post
2 tags
“Even people who only run randomized experiments could benefit from a little more...”
– Sanjay Srivastava, Do not use what I am about to teach you.
August 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“This foundation [for sociobiologists concerned with cooperation] includes...”
– Panchanathan K. George Price, the Price equation, and cultural group selection. Evol Hum Behav
July 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we...”
– David Sosa, “The Spoils of Happiness,” via brainpicker (via dianakimball)
June 2011
3 posts
“It’s probably just a coincidence that when people get exercised about the...”
– Robert Kurzban, To Which Organisms, If Any, Does The Logic Of Adaptationism Apply?
“A test is said to be face valid if it appears to measure what it purports to...”
– Paul Kline, A handbook of test construction: introduction to psychometric design, 1986 via Mind Hacks
May 2011
5 posts
1 tag
WatchGorilla traditions for eating nettles.
Byrne, Hobaiter, Klailova. 2011. Local traditions in gorilla manual skill: evidence for observational learning of behavioral organization. Animal Cognition.
“We’re often tempted to add decimal places to the answer to one question instead...”
– John D Cook, Move on to the next question — The Endeavour
1 tag
2 tags
Personality and the senses
there is an apparent relationship between certain personality traits and sensory capacities.…[S]ensory capacity may provide a filter through which we perceive the world, and that this filter may influence the picture we receive of the world….We found no coherence between personality traits and gustatory modality (mainly related to eating) but significant coherence between personality...
April 2011
1 post
David Attenborough on identifying individual... →
BBC Radio 4 - David Attenborough’s Life Stories, Series 2, Identities
March 2011
5 posts
“[T]heory [is] the formation of testable hypotheses, while…empirical work [is]...”
– R Gorelick, What is theory? _Ideas in Ecology and Evolution_.
“All of what follows will appear ridiculously obvious to those who have had no...”
– William M. Briggs, Group Differences: An Exceedingly Brief Introduction To Bayesian Predictive Inference via @StatFact.
This American Life #317: Unconditional Love →
psychotherapy:
Hard as it is to believe, during the early Twentieth Century, a whole school of mental health professionals decided that unconditional love was a terrible thing to give a child. The government printed pamphlets warning mothers against the dangers of holding their kids. The head of the American Psychological Association and even a mothers’ organization endorsed the position that...
1 tag
2 tags
February 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“In making adaptive explanations, we have to go beyond description and assert...”
– Weiss, Kenneth M., Dunsworth, Holly M. Dr. Pangloss’s nose: In evolution, cause, correlation, and effect are not always identical. Evolutionary Anthropology. 2011. 20 1 1520-6505 DOI 10.1002/evan.20285
“The Wright-Fisher controversy forms a cornerstone of the history and philosophy...”
– Steven A Frank, Wright’s adaptive landscape versus Fisher’s fundamental theorem. (arXiv:1102.3709v1 [q-bio.PE])
1 tag
“The p-value reported by R is also very, very low, which seems good, but remember...”
– Cosma Shalizi, Testing Parametric Regression Models with Nonparametric Smoothers
1 tag
Hold on to the keys to your tool shed
Opening up SPSS the other day, the program, staring at me with a screwed up face, offered the following greeting:
A quick journey though the “Authentication Wizard” soon had the program placated. Whether the amnesiatic spell was from SPSS or the operating system, the experience emphasizes the importance of open tools for science. Don’t allow yourself to be locked out of your...
2 tags
Collective and other multilevel personalities
With personality or, more generally, individuality we take as our level of analysis the person (not necessarily a human person). But personality could just the consistent, differentiated behavior of a particular system.
Margaret K. Wray, Heather R. Mattila, Thomas D. Seeley, Collective personalities in honeybee colonies are linked to colony fitness, Animal Behaviour, In Press, Corrected Proof,...
“We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines...”
– What self-perceptual bias makes us think we—and our world—are so broken?
Adam Gopnik, How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker
January 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Supplementary Information 4: Project expenses
There is an intriguing new paper suggesting that people in your social network may be more or less likely than chance to share specific genes with you. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around all the analysis (Daniel MacArther at Genetic Future has a good summary), but this being one of those papers that was all over the news before actual publication, I was quite struck by some of the...
1 tag
“Most papers sit in a wasteland of silence, attracting no attention whatsoever.”
– Phil Davis via Peer review: Trial by Twitter : Nature News (via Instapaper)
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“The idea that personality traits are the validity weaklings of the predictive...”
– [P]ersonality psychologists should not apologize for correlations between .10 and .30, given that the effect sizes found in personality psychology are no different than those found in other fields of inquiry.
Brent W. Roberts, Nathan R. Kuncel, Rebecca Shiner, Avshalom Caspi, and Lewis R....
2 tags
Terminology: dimensions, factors, domains
Rough definitions for dimensional models of personality
dimension The latent thing that encompasses components, factors, and domains. This is what we are trying to study.
component, factor Yielded by EFA and PCA. Not interpreted.
domain Actual scores for each individual on a component or factor (loading).
None of this addresses the question of why personality should come out as (mostly)...
1 tag
Special issue of Philosophical Transactions B on... →
December 2010
2 posts
1 tag
“24) It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are....”
– Douglas Coupland, A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years, via Patrick Rhone
2 tags
Installing matplotlib on OS X 10.6 with homebrew
This one took me a while figure out…
For some reason once I am working with plots that involve calculus, R doesn’t feel right. Part of me might prefer Mathematica for tasks like this but, alas, it is quite out of my price range and the only way I know to access it at uni is through the computing cluster. So I’m using matplotlib as an alternative to R for more math-y type plotting.
...
November 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Passing around dot-dot-dots in R
The ... (pronounced dot-dot-dot) is a special argument for R functions that captures any arguments to a function that are not otherwise named. It is useful for making functions that can process arbitrary numbers of arguments. One such commonly used function that uses the dot-dot-dot is paste
This can be really cool way to make a function that can process as many objects as you care to through at...